Last month we had embarked on a journey to get an application icon onto the Start menu. We got as far as creating a shortcut on the desktop and hopefully we’ll get it to the Start Menu this month. You may want to review last month’s article. Our web site has the last several month’s newsletters in HTML format and also the Acrobat Reader format. Go to http://www.canx.com/tpcug.

I’d like to ask you, please; this article should not just be read. Sit at your computer and poke around and follow around with the mouse. All this needs practice to learn well. It isn’t cerebral in nature, it takes experience and practice. I remember very well when I got my first computer with a graphical interface, an Atari 1040 ST. The first couple of evenings I was sweating it. I was convinced I’d made a very serious mistake spending a thousand dollars (for something without a hard drive) and I was never going to get the hang of it. After a few days, something just clicked in my brain, and I was having fun again, discovering how the thing worked.

Although you may want all your most useful icons on the desktop, there’s a practical limit, when the desktop becomes so cluttered that you can’t find what you want. And besides, application windows cover up desktop icons. What about the applications you need while you have other windows covering it up? What if a desktop icon is inadvertently deleted? That’s easy to do. If it’s on the Start menu, it’s never covered up because it pops up over everything, and it’s difficult to delete.

Let’s look at the Start Menu. By default, when Windows is first installed, reading from the bottom is Shutdown, Run, Help, Find, Settings, Documents and Programs. Since the menu is hierarchical in nature, expanding as needed, we’ll call this level the First, or Root level. Some program installations add some items above Programs at the root. Office 95 and 97 do that. Personally, I like to reserve that right for my own stuff. So when Office put that "New Office Document" and "Open Office Document" at the root, I simply moved them to a newly created "MS Office" group myself. While Office is important to me, it’s not so important that I want to skip around it all the time.

If you move your cursor to Programs and let it expand, this is where another level of items branch out. We’ll call this the second, or Programs level. Most of the items at this level have new branches of their own that contain program items and also more branches. You’ll see that for instance if you expand the level Accessories, that this level contains single items like Notepad, and also contains other levels like System Tools. Inside System Tools, there’s nothing except items. I’m referring to single items as applications or shortcuts that do not have an expansion right arrow to go further. All this may seem obvious to you, I suppose, but my intention is to take the mystery out of all this because we need to relate this cascading tree to directories, or folders.

To successfully navigate this whole exercise, you may notice that we’re having to learn a lot of background stuff that leads up to where we’re going. That’s ok. Hopefully we’ll have a lot of background that’ll be useful for a lot of other things. Like directories, also called folders. We’ll call them folders. Ok, here we go. Select Start, Select Settings, and Select Taskbar. Select the tab Start Menu Programs. Select the button Advanced. Is the Explorer view a double pane, with All Folders on the left and ‘Contents of C:\WINDOWS\Start Menu on the right? Also if the details of the files on the right are not showing, Select View from the Explorer menu, then click Details.

Now, we’ll explore just a bit. Size the window so that it’s short, but wide, then move it to the top of your screen. Next move your mouse to the Start menu. Select Start, Select Programs, Select Accessories, Select System Tools. Then move to the explorer window, click on the folder icon Start Menu, and look at the items on the right. You’re positioned at the root if the Start Menu folder on the left is open. Then select the "+" attached to Programs. It’ll expand to folders. Select the folder icon Programs. Look at the right. You’re at the Programs level.

In addition to Folders on the right you’ll also see a couple of items -program icons -like MS-DOS and Windows Explorer. Right-click the Windows Explorer, and drag it to the left pane and drop it on the folder Start Menu. When the small pop-up menu appears, Select Copy. Then go back to the bottom of the screen, and look at the result. Above the Programs level, at the root, you’ll see a Windows Explorer. What my intentions here are for you to see the relationship between this directory structure and the Start Menu. The Start Menu is just a collection of directories underneath a directory called c:\windows\Start Menu. Now let’s finalize by selecting the icon for Calc.Exe we left on the desktop with the left mouse, drag it to Programs in the left pane and drop it. Select Move this time, because we don’t need it on the desktop anymore. Close out the windows-all of them-and look at the Start Menu. You should see two changes. One is a copy of Windows Explorer in the root of the menu, and a nice location as far as I’m concerned, and also a Calc item under programs, which I would delete now. Go back through the instructions to open up the directories and delete the Calc shortcut. Just for the fun of it.

There are a couple of other ways to access the Start Menu directories, the most notable one being to Right-Click on the Start button, and select Open from that menu. This isn’t my favorite way to do menu maintenance, but it will work, and I’d admit it’s more of a personal preference.

Now you’re in control of your own Start Menu. One of the things that will happen is that your second level -Programs level -will get too tall as you’ve added programs over time. If that’s the case, it’s time to reorganize. Move all your games folders at the program level to a new folder called Games, for instance. MS Office always moves its program items to the Program level. I prefer to make a folder MS Office and move all Office icons into that folder.

Practice. You’re in control of this thing, and the more you do, the easier it gets.